5/20/2013
By Ivan Pereira
Before the city’s public school students begin their summer break, they’re going to get one additional lesson about tolerance.
Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott announced Monday that he sent a memo to all city principals advising them to create and implement anti-hate lesson plans by the end of the school year.
Walcott, who made the announcement with City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, said in light of the increase in violent hate crimes in the city, it was important to teach kids the value of diversity.
“We cannot tolerate this at all,” the chancellor said of Saturday’s murder of Marc Carson, 32.
Quinn, a mayoral candidate, said each school will determine how exactly they will send the message to their students with assemblies, in class lessons or other programs. The speaker said she hopes the lessons taught by the initiative will spread outside the city’s youth.
“When they talk to their parents, or grandparents . . . about what they learned that day in school . . . it will cause those ripples in education to spread out to people older than school age,” she said.
Walcott added that the Department of Education will continue to do similar programs at the start of the next school year.
Chancellor Walcott in a memo to NYC school principals directed them to putting in place ‘anti-hate’ lessons. This need exists not only in NYC but in every part of the US, including Long Island.
The opposite of anti-hate Dr. Walcott is love. Children need to be enveloped in a loving environment, whether at school or at home. Instead of being preached at (taught) it has to be felt by them. It requires a systemic approach wherein administrators, teachers, and parents are asked to become more aware of their own unloving, conditional behaviors and prejudices and asked to model loving, unconditional behaviors.
Only then can we ask children to be willing to look at their own behaviors and prejudices.
Whether it is gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, or ethnicity teaching loving behaviors toward ALL is essential for the harmonious coexistence of diverse individuals – until we stop seeing diversity and only see humanity.
The Human Development Company has developed the only curriculum based on loving behaviors that is both systemic and validated by the latest research on loving behaviors – which proves that love is a nutrient and therefore necessary for the well-being and harmony of all. (B. Fredrickson, Ph.D. – ‘Love 2.0’).